I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to capping orthogonal resources used for sending acknowledgements (ACK).
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as, for example, voice, data, and so on. Typical wireless communication systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems may include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP LTE systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), localized frequency division multiplexing (LFDM), orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and the like.
In a wireless communication system, a Node B (or base station) may transmit data to a user equipment (UE) on the downlink and/or receive data from the UE on the uplink. The downlink (DL) (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the Node B to the UE, and the uplink (UL) (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the UE to the Node B. The Node B may also send non-data information (e.g., assignments of system resources, acknowledgement (ACK) from the UE and/or a core network. Similarly, the UE may send non-data information to the Node B to support data transmission on the downlink and/or for other purposes.
One type of non-data information exchanged between the UE and Node B is an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement can be sent via an ACKCH to indicate that the information was received on the other end successfully. If an acknowledgement is not received within a predetermined amount of time, data can be retransmitted to the remote receiver.